


Habit

by byzantienne



Category: Tokyo Babylon, X/1999
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-30
Updated: 2009-09-30
Packaged: 2017-10-04 00:15:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Displacement makes the heart grow fonder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Habit

**Author's Note:**

> This is the other side to ["Projection"](http://lindensphinx.livejournal.com/326308.html) \-- the year after Tokyo Babylon, this time from Seishirou's point of view. Directly inter-related with the aforementioned fic, though it should read fine on its own.
> 
> The thematic inspiration on this one is entirely [](http://mithrigil.livejournal.com/profile)[**mithrigil**](http://mithrigil.livejournal.com/)'s fault; blame her for the shoelaces, and also for [the visual idea of Seishirou alone and unwatched.](http://mithrigil.livejournal.com/392772.html)
> 
> Worksafe, Seishirou/Subaru, spoilers through all of Tokyo Babylon. Post-series fic, taking place between 1991 and 1992.

The hold music is tinny, cheerful, with a poppy beat interrupted every twenty seconds by reassurances from Tokyo Electric Power Company that someone will be with him shortly.

Seishirou pins the phone between his ear and his shoulder and tips himself backward against the padded back of the hotel's Western-style chair. His feet go up onto the table, casual sprawl. One of his bootlaces is stained dull red, just barely visible against the black. He'll have to change it out; it looks like he'd been tramping through mud. The music in his ear wavers, cuts to static, cuts back in, unchanged. Still on hold.

Some of Hokuto-chan's blood is trapped underneath the cuticles of his fingers. Seishirou sighs, unfolds himself, and walks over to see if the phone cord will stretch enough to reach the bathroom counter. It just does, all the kinks unkinked, and if he balances on one foot and leans, he can snag his toiletry bag from next to the sink. He roots around in it, coming up with an orange stick and a bottle of nail polish remover.

On the way back to the chair, he resettles the phone against his ear.

"-- may I direct your call, Mr.--?"

"Sakurazuka," Seishirou says, perching on the side of the bed. "Service cancellation, please."

"Just a moment, Sakarazuka-san, I'll transfer you."

He dips the orange stick in the little bottle, wetting it, and begins pushing the cuticles back. Cutting them always dries out his skin, and then there are hangnails.

"I'm so sorry to hear you're no longer interested in our services," chirps the phone. "Would you please be kind enough as to tell us the reason for your cancellation?"

Seishirou sweeps the blood away with the sharp corner of the orange stick. "Oh," he says, "I'm moving house. I've relocated my place of business." Some of the flakes are stuck on, and he has to scrape harder.

"Will you be needing Tokyo Electric Power Company service at your new residence, Sakarazuka-san?"

He thinks, for a moment, of Subaru-kun amongst the _sakanagi_ animals in the clinic, smiling and hesitant. The image is pleasantly nostalgic. "You know," he tells the phone, "I don't think so. But if I change my mind, Tokyo Electric Power will be the first place I call with my business."

Experimentally, he lifts the reddened bit of wood to his mouth, licks away the residue. The acetone-bitter taste washes over his tongue, and he wrinkles up his nose.

\---

 

As he wakes, Seishirou reaches out, groping at the bedside table for the glasses. The gesture is automatic and unnecessary. He leaves his hand there, empty, and looks up at the ceiling instead. The texture of the paint is still clear to his left eye, a faint gradient. Habits are so ingrained, he thinks. Persistent.

Really quite funny, physical memory.

He spares a moment to be proud of his autonomic nervous system, still clinging to yesterday's costume like scraps of unshed snakeskin. Flips his hand over, palm against the texture of the empty table, pushes up off the bed. Dresses. Considers.

Tucks a pair of sunglasses into his breast pocket. He has to preserve what's left of his vision, after all.

\---

 

Tokyo's one of the largest cities in the world. When Seishirou gets on the Yamanote line, like he does most evenings on the way back from work to his new apartment, he doesn't recognize a single face in his train car. He doesn't even need illusion to be invisible. It just helps with the stubborn parts.

His reflection cuts a jaunty figure in the reinforced glass windows of the car. The brightly lit interior is flattering; it casts his good side into sharp relief against the Tokyo night outside the train and hides the rest of him in soft shadows, just the whitish flash of his damaged eye showing. The black background of the window makes an excellent mirror. It gives his face depth and gravitas. As the train moves, his reflection blots out one block of lights after another, catching and releasing the city piecemeal.

None of the blood on his suit shows in the image; blackened red on black, wet down to his skin.

Some high-school-age girls are watching him watch himself, their eyes fixed straight forward on the car window. He grins at them without looking. One of them has hair like Subaru-kun's: longish and a little messy, like her sister's put too much time into arranging it and it's all come undone during the day. It's cute.

Emerging from the subway, Seishirou turns his head up to the sky. The clouds are dim and heavy, shadows piled on shadows, and Tokyo lights them a distorted orange from below. He spreads his hands, shifts a finger, inscribing familiar gestures. The illusion draws tighter around him. The city doesn't remember he's there while he waits for the rain, while he walks home in it, humming, unheard.

\---

 

If he wants to, Seishirou can still feel his marks on Subaru-kun's hands. It's a low, persistent buzzing in the base of his skull, a sound like the rushing of blood or a frenzied heartbeat too fast to make clear. It tugs, just a little. Tells him where his prey is. He'll always know.

Those hands are his. They want to come back to him. Displacement makes the heart grow fonder.

\---

 

On the way to work, Seishirou buys: a carton of Mild Sevens.

On the way back from work, Seishirou buys: a bar of chocolate, a bunch of bok choi to stir-fry over rice, and a bar of soap.

\---

 

Winter air steams his breath white, mixing with the white of the smoke from his cigarette. It blows his trenchcoat back, fluttering it like a long dark flag. The rooftop he's standing on is barely dusted with snow.

Three rooftops away, Subaru-kun almost blends in, _shikifuku_ on snowflakes, everything except the black shock of his hair. He's hardly trying to disappear. The air shakes with faint tremors, echoes, drawn tight with the ritual he's speaking. He's grown, Seishirou thinks. It's intriguing.

Subaru is facing away from him. He moves one rooftop closer. The snow plumes up around his feet when he lands, and crunches softly. Subaru doesn't notice. Seishirou smiles.

He's thinner. Taller. Older, naturally.

He'll stay until Subaru-kun has finished his work and gone on, he decides. His own job will keep an hour or so; it's just in the next building over, after all.

\---

 

The expression on Subaru's face when he opens his mailbox and the _sakura_ petals spill over his hands, coating them, is exquisite.

\---

 

_**habit**, noun.  
1\. a customary practice or use; repeated daily action.  
2\. a dominant and regular disposition or tendency.  
3\. an addiction. _

\---  
.


End file.
